


These Are the Things That Stay

by carmilla_unscripted



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 02:56:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2797055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carmilla_unscripted/pseuds/carmilla_unscripted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She kissed me on the mouth without hesitation, and the look in her eyes reminded me how selfish I was, using her like a symbol for redemption.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Are the Things That Stay

**Author's Note:**

> These Are the Things That Stay  
> Word Length: 3426  
> Rating: M  
> Pairing(s): Hollstein  
> Summary: She kissed me on the mouth without hesitation, and the look in her eyes reminded me how selfish I was, using her like a symbol for redemption.
> 
> You can also find this story on my tumblr, carmilla-unscripted.tumblr.com

I imagined beginnings as something soft.

Elle was soft. She was soft in the quiet, unassuming way she had of threading her short fingers between mine when she kissed me, no tongue and barely a breath, just the little thrust of her breasts through a corset and the pulse of the velvet skin under her arms. It happened on our sofa in the parlor of the house on Elk Street, and Maman was watching from the staircase so I played along, but it was the skin, right there in the crease between her arm and the corset, that was warm and silky and made me mewl.

She kissed me. She kissed me first. I held on to that like an idiot because otherwise I was a pathetic, hopeful fool who misread all the signs. And it was embarrassing, and it made Maman and Will right when they accused me of going soft.

I had always been attracted to supple things—the girls I trapped for Maman. She did not care what they looked like so long as they were fresh and warm, so I had my pick of the lot at the boarding schools and ballrooms she packed me off to. Maman first noticed it was always the same type of girl, placid and elastic and willing, doe-eyes framed in loose ringlets when that was the style, clad in colored silk dresses that curved below their collars so I could see the blood as it throbbed in their arteries.

Pale skin, but browner than mine. Smooth labia. Malleable thighs. Dark, hot insides. Maman teased me for my taste, how I loved the soft virgins, but I could see that she did too and I was pleased, for a while, to share the joke with her, anything for the little affectionate caresses and kisses that reminded me of her love. Because sometimes I needed reminders; some days I was desperate for them.

Beginnings held no fanfare. I woke to the endless curse in Maman’s embrace, as she clutched me to the tender skin of her neck, where my teeth broke and I sucked. Beginnings were female flesh and Elle’s lips. They slunk in quietly, teasingly, and it was only later when it didn’t matter anymore, but also mattered more than anything, that you looked back to pinpoint the start and saw that it was there, right there, the moment when you were able to breathe again.

Endings I always recognized. I was good at those. Endings were riptides.

 

\---

 

There were no stars on the first night, but Laura’s eyes shone in the light of the desk lamp and so I didn’t notice. I was exhausted and disjointed from almost dying. Only my lips buzzed from the desperate pressure of her kisses.

“You want a light?” she asked, and we grimaced at her word choice, but this was a yellow Edison lightbulb, solid and scientific. Nothing to be afraid of.

I shrugged it off. “Your light, cupcake.”

“Ah,” Laura muttered. “Now she decides to care about personal boundaries.”

She turned on the headboard lamp.

I sighed, too tired to untangle the implications of pulling back her sheets and curling up with my back pressed against the wall.

“Where am I supposed to sleep?” she pouted.

“Can you not take a hint?” I grumbled, face first in the bean-bag coolness of her pillow. I could smell me on it, mingled with her. Also the salty smell of tears. The bed dipped with the feather-weight of her body and I reached out blindly, finding her at the junction of her armpit and chest. I slid down, touching the crease of her elbow. Smooth. Soft little wrinkles of skin. She stayed very still. I found her neck, traced her pulse, felt the blood rush down her body to the folds between her legs, and when I looked her eyes were dark and shining, and in another life they were the stars that would have led me home.

 

\---

  
Laura cried in her sleep; I had never seen that before, her heaving chest and cracked mouth, and it terrified me because it was so real and alive and immediate and I had to deal with it because the sound was splitting my chest. And there was this moment, this dark, drowning moment that I resented her for the way she made me hurt.

If it’d been the amazon or Laf or even that dimwit Perry I could have walked away and left them to their demons, and in that somehow protect myself from the cool beginnings of caring, but I’d been caught up in Laura the moment I saw how the earth moved around her. My ribs still ached from Xena steamrolling me onto the bed but I could hardly blame her when it was Laura who had orchestrated it. Laura who had chosen.

I thought of the beginning as the space between her sobs. A choice existed in the empty place. I either did it or I didn’t. Elle either kissed me or she didn’t. She always did. I shook Laura gently but she slid away from me, so I shook her hard and she jerked awake, eyes wide and bloodshot, and I regretted it instantly—but it was too late, she was out of bed, catching her foot in the sheet and crying harder. My hands were numb and useless. I lay there staring at her dumbly.

Before class the next morning Laura doodled on her vlog; I made her hot cocoa and kissed the top of her head in apology, though I wasn’t sure she remembered. She took the mug and abandoned the laptop to kiss me on the mouth without hesitation, and the look in her eyes reminded me how selfish I was, using her like a symbol for redemption.

 

\---

 

Laf brought blood from the biology department. Laura drained soymilk cartons; her father mailed a monthly allowance and she added them to her grocery list. She regarded the soymilk like a foreign invader—though I caught her dunking cookies once or twice without complaint—but drank them grudgingly so I could refill the empty ones with blood.

I was delicate about blood. I drank in intermittent sips because every swallow could drown me if I let it, if I did not steel my bones. The taste was good; the sensation of it filling my throat felt like water sealing my lungs. Reminded me of closed in places and choking around air I didn’t need. The irony was nearly Shakespearian.

Laura offered me refills when she saw my glass getting low.

“My own mortal servant,” I gloated.

“You never had one before?” she asked in surprise, and sometimes I forgot that this was Laura, and Laura did her homework about things that actually mattered to her.

“Never one as pretty,” I said, smelling the spike in her blood across the room. “My human father suspected my…preferences and stuck me with a tired old hag who’d worked in the washroom. But the memory is dull. The world glows now, in comparison. I don’t think you realize how radiant you are to a vampire, my dear,” I added, to smell her reaction again. Much warmer than the defrosted blood from Laf’s dead people fridge. I set aside the glass she brought me and pulled her into my lap. I sat at the edge of the bed so her thighs straddled either side of me. I could feel the blood concentrate and swell between her legs. She made my head whirl and stop at the same time.

“Humm.” She breathed an investigative little laugh and wiggled closer till her crotch pressed against my bare midriff. She sighed. Closed her eyes at the contact. She looked like she was going to kiss me but ducked her head to my neck instead and ran her teeth down the skin.

I froze. I concentrated on turning all my bones to steel.

“Not there,” I grit out, and later I thought I must have looked like a wild-eyed cat because she scrambled off and stood in front of me with her open palms out in the universal sign of surrender.

“Ok, Ok,” she said. “See?”

I breathed through my mouth. “Christ, cupcake. Warn a girl.”

 

\---

 

The pit cracked open and burned. That was what I remembered. The light seared red-hot prints into the deepest layer of my flesh and I screamed and no one heard and now the hurt just sat there, even though the one thing I had always stupidly thought I could avoid was hurt that stayed—soft hurt that tainted the edges of the world and distorted the shapes of things I thought I had known. My vision blurred in and out. I began to understand why vampires in the mythologies had a penchant for burning in sunlight.

“Do you even go to class?” Laura asked, rolling her chair to my bedside and offering out a tray of cookies. Gingerbread.

“No,” I grunted through a face-full of her pillow.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” she mused. I felt her drop crumbs on my bed.

“Do you have to eat those?” I complained. “They change your smell.”

She laughed. “What am I supposed to smell like?”

I grumbled into the pillow.

“What?”

“Chocolate,” I muttered.

She climbed onto the bed later and I could hear the gears turning in her head, debating whether I would reject her or not, and it gave me a small sense of satisfaction to know she was oblivious to the goddamn hurt in my chest that was partly her fault, the pain that made me ache for her to just touch me, if she could just touch and never let go; then maybe the touches would explain it to me the way words couldn’t. Her worn flannel brushed against my bare legs. She smoothed the hair from my face, exposing my cheek to her snuffling breaths.

“Carm,” she said slowly.

“What?” I snapped. I shifted to peek at her with one eye. I could smell myself, unwashed and tired.

“I just wanted you to know I ate a chocolate cake in the quad just now. Well, actually I split it with Laf but they only had like a quarter and Perry was definitely judging me a little bit but—”

“Fuck, fine cupcake,” I groused, flipping over to face her, but I moved too fast and I hadn’t really been drinking as much as I should have, between lying in bed and avoiding coursework, and somewhere in the scramble of our lips my shoulder muscles spasmed and I fell back. My eyesight went spotty. My brain short-circuited. I heard Laura saying, “Carm, Carmilla,” and thought I saw the blurred lines of her face above me.

When she brought me the carton of blood I drowned in it, the metallic-smell and sweetness a demented, merciful salvation.

 

\---

 

Her hands did not apologize.

I asked if she was a virgin and she rankled a little at the word and I dropped it, but couldn’t resist asking, “Never did a favor for any of your TAs?” with a smirk that she nearly slapped off of me.

I fucked Elle against the wall in the hallway outside a ballroom and she slid her fingers inside of me in a marble tub once. Her earrings played cool tricks against my cheekbone. She stayed on the bottom, her hand pumping up and my hips crashing down. I rushed it, rubbing my clit furiously to get it over with before my mother came home to remind me of our timetable. Elle gave short, tiny whimpers that enflamed my cunt, and I was red and sore and desperate as the water sloshed around us.

Nine days later Elle was gone, playing victim to my mother’s pastime, and I was submerged in a coffin of blood.

Laura’s hands were grateful but they did not apologize.

“You’re beautiful,” she mumbled, lips abuzz with a smile she couldn’t contain even though it made our teeth clack together. “You’re very impossibly beautiful.” I hummed in something like agreement. She laughed. “Don’t look so smug.” I wanted to ask her why not, except the vibrations in her throat sent me reeling.

She peeled off my pants and danced around my thong. She frowned through unbuttoning my shirt.

“Something wrong, sundance?” I asked lazily, trying to sound nonchalant.

She leaned down and kissed the soft skin above my belly button, and then—was she smelling me? “It’s just…you were dead. I thought—you stupid vampire, I never asked you to—”

“I know, I know.” I struggled onto my elbows. “You can protect yourself. Don’t kill the mood, cupcake.”

She had, of course, asked, which was the point.

We fucked. I orgasmed around her fingers. She held them inside of me for a long time afterwards, her thumb kneading my clit as my hips jerked uncontrollably in her hand. I threw my head to one side, too drowsy with pleasure to open my eyes. She kissed the inside of my thigh and pressed her tongue to my clit, hard. “Oh,” I whimpered, belly undulating long after the first wave of pleasure had ripped through me.

 

\---

 

We fought a monster and then each other. I trailed into our room at three o’ clock in the morning with a baseball bat and her blood on my shirt and I told her she couldn’t have it both ways. Either I could play at being her hero or I could sit on the sidelines while she called the shots.

She said, “Why can’t you be your own hero?”

When this was over, I would remember her eyes when she stood her ground and preached from her soapbox. They were darker than sex. They made me believe in the version of myself that she saw, or wanted to see, or was molding me to be with all of her best intentions.

For all its naivety her conviction was honest, and didn’t I want her that way?

In the middle of the night she stirred in her bed and looked up at where she knew I was reading on the other side of the room. “It’s freezing,” she muttered, hauling herself out of bed to turn up the heat that I had twisted down.

“Laura,” I said coolly, a little miffed that she wouldn’t even acknowledge me after I’d saved her ass from a horde of flying tombstones.

“Carm,” she said. “Can you just…let me be mad for a little while?” She didn’t wait for me to answer, just shuffled back to bed, like she was less asking permission and more reminding me gently that she was allowed to be angry. Her silhouette was small and subtle against the backdrop of the white wall. She didn’t lie down. I counted seconds and flipped the pages of the book without reading any of it, the both of us awake on opposite sides of the room, staring at the darkness.

With Maman, arguments had been long, drawn-out creatures that prowled the space between us, silent and deep and deadly, clawing grooves into our good will for each other. Laura’s were a different flavor. She was justified and vindictive and stubborn, but there were no power dynamics at play. She asked for the time to feel whatever it was she was feeling, that was all, and it made me wonder which lasted longer—anger itself or the resonance of the words we said and the trust we broke.

 

\---

 

When Laura’s father found out that Silas had nearly been swallowed by a vortex of ethereal doom he threatened to remove her from the school. I heard them yelling at each other in the bathroom. Laura’s phone was on speaker. She had a habit of holding her hands out in front of her when she argued, like see, don’t you see that I am right, it’s right there in my hands. I could picture the scene, from the phone balanced on the sink to the way her eyes flashed when she was pissed. She was beautiful, a whirl wind of purpose encased in rage and fervor. A tidal wave unto herself.

The conversation ended ambiguously. Tuition was paid out of her father’s bank account but Laura didn’t seem overly concerned when he threatened to cut her off, and if anyone knew how resourceful she could be, it was me. Betting against her would probably only encourage her.

I raised my eyebrows when she stormed out of the bathroom. “Trouble in paradise, sweetheart?”

“I don’t want to belong to him anymore,” Laura cried in exasperation, throwing her phone on the desk. “I don’t want anyone to own me.” She huffed, throwing her hands up and falling face first on her bed. And she called _me_ the drama queen. I smirked.

“We’re all our parents’ children,” I said sagely, a throwaway line out of a movie script.

She popped her head up from her pillow. “As my girlfriend,” she said in a slow, grated tone, “Can you say something that is not totally pointless and pretentious right now?”

My grin widened, and I crossed the room to her. Leaned down slowly so she could feel the chill of my presence before I touched her. She gave a little whine of protest but then I wrapped my arms around her belly, pressing my chest into her back and fitting my head into the curve of her neck. I took an unnecessary breath and blew on her skin; she shivered, and her back arched almost imperceptibly. “Cutie,” I husked. “As a 334 year old vampire who sacrificed her life for you, I believe I’m allowed a little pretention, don’t you think? However, as your _girlfriend_ —” and we had not used that word before but it transformed my entire perception of self, like I was some giddy, fresh creature, like my veins had cracked open and made me lighter, somehow, “—I suppose I can see what I can do."

 

\---

 

Later, after sex, we cuddled with the sheets tangled at our feet. She was warm and sleepy and cradled me to her heart without a word. I hummed softly against her breast, watching in fascination as her nipple hardened. I stroked her areola lazily.

“You keep bear spray under your bed,” I murmured when we had laid there for a while and her phone had buzzed a few times, and I could read the caller ID from here and knew she could see it too.

“What?” she said, turning her head to look down at me. She was getting tense again, and fidgety.

“You take pepper spray with you if you go out at night,” I continued. “And I know you keep a pile of Mrs. Clean’s stakes under your bed. Also,” I added. “You know how to make weapons out of spatulas.”

“I like to be prepared,” she defended.

“I know,” I promised. “What I’m saying is, you can’t remove him from yourself and expect to be the same.”

She went very still. I didn't know what I had expected. Her arms tightened around me and I prepared myself for the onslaught.

I was arguing for the wrong side, of course. If I could wring out the parts of me that Maman had touched I would in a heartbeat, if only to be able to drink again without the phantom feeling of drowning in my throat.

But you could not just erase entire people from yourself.

“I can’t believe you’re defending him!” Laura’s voice rose an octave in my ear.

I sighed. Of course she would see it that way. The world was black and white to her. To her there were beginnings and ends and absolute breaks, and either you were on her side or you were the enemy.

So I blew a raspberry into the tender skin below her breast.

“Carmilla!” she squealed. I did it again, laughing dark and silky the way I knew drove her _wild_ because I could smell her, the surge of arousal melting her core. I lunged up her body, nuzzling my nose into her warm neck and inhaling the tropical smell of her hair. The length of her wiggled against me, like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to be mad anymore. I nibbled her ear to make her giggle and my whole world narrowed into that sound.

I had said to her once that it was comforting to think how small we were in comparison to stars—that we and the stories that made up our bones were nothing to that far-off light.

In a way, her laughter was the opposite of stars.


End file.
